Rappaport and the 'white cube' at Ratio 3

Installation view showing untitled paintings and works in mixed media by Noam Rappaport at Ratio 3, San Francisco

Installation view showing untitled paintings and works in mixed media by Noam Rappaport at Ratio 3, San Francisco

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Photo: Unknown

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Installation view showing untitled paintings and works in mixed media by Noam Rappaport at Ratio 3, San Francisco

Installation view showing untitled paintings and works in mixed media by Noam Rappaport at Ratio 3, San Francisco

Photo: Unknown

Rappaport and the 'white cube' at Ratio 3

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The biggest surprise on the San Francisco art landscape awaits those who have not yet seen Ratio 3 in its new Outer Mission incarnation.

Abruptly as a jump cut, the front door to a windowless, all black storefront takes the visitor from Mission Street's dismal social spectacle and cacophony to a vast, quiet white interior, overflowing with light.

A certain audience will see the venue as a throwback to the denigrated "white cube," as Brian O'Doherty branded the conventional sort of gallery space, designed to lift art and its viewers into a spotless realm of salesroom false consciousness.

Ratio 3, filled with the work of Bolinas native and Los Angeles resident Noam Rappaport, reminds us why gallery conventions evolved the way they did in the first place: their unique promise of clear vision, undisturbed focus, the chance to hear oneself think.

Of course, the white cube's quietly intimidating atmosphere occasionally discourages the curious. Of course, it invites collectors' acquisitive impulses to bloom. But in a culture that makes concentration seem like a vanishing skill, the white cube's time may be coming back.

Rappaport's work also has its throwback qualities. It anticipates viewers already acquainted with the "shaped canvas" - the deconstruction of the traditional pictorial rectangle's arbitrariness that Frank Stella led in the 1960s.

Like Stella, but less soberly, perhaps with a thought of Elizabeth Murray (1940-2007), Rappaport makes the perimeters of several of his pieces on stretched canvas interact compositionally with shapes painted on them. Here and there, he cuts apertures in his canvases so that the wall seems to participate in the work that hangs on it.

Rappaport engages in further allusive mischief in a fine untitled piece whose cruciform composition - made of found wood and of green acrylic layered so heavily that it formed a slab - seems to bite into and wrinkle its canvas support, framed within a frame. Anyone who knows the abstract work of Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) and its utopian associations will spot a wry reference to them here.

Rappaport's art can look academic when he does not offset its studied quality with chance-infiltrated passages or funny devices such as the black lines that float (on little transparent pegs) in front of several pieces.

Years ago - few seem to have noticed - I coined the term "comic abstraction" for a mode of contemporary artwork that respects abstraction as an idiom of creative striving, but refuses to take it too seriously. On the evidence of his Ratio 3 show, Rappaport works in that vein, and ought to deepen his commitment to it further.

"Stain" at 60Six:Julian Hoenig's "Stain" at 60Six suggests how difficult simplicity has become in contemporary abstract art.

Hoenig, a Silicon Valley engineer who tends to do his studio work by night, coats unframed sheets of mulberry paper with wood stain of various hues. The works that result, such as "Half Half 2" (2013), minimize distinctions between content and the residue of process. Yet they cannot fend off allusions or metaphoric associations.

The late works of Mark Rothko (1903-1970), particularly those on paper, come to mind here. The sense of Rothko having purged the landscape format of subject matter, except what belongs to viewers' private memories, finds an echo here.

Light seems to bleed across the division in Hoenig's "Half Half" (2013), as over a dark horizon at daybreak. His pieces evoke not merely partitioning of the real into domains of light and darkness or earth and air, but of the very need to carve existence conceptually to cope with its superabundance.

That reading gets encouragement from a couple of pieces here choked with the detail of repeatedly printed engineering drawings.

Pieces of "Resistance": Tehran native Taraneh Hemami has a powerful show of sculpture at the Luggage Store that conjures the activist optimism and fears predating and surviving the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the stifling theocracy it ushered into power.

Nothing dates more readily than topical art, so give Hemami credit for inventions whose artistic power persists, no matter the unfamiliarity of their topical trigger points.

Her "Blood Curtain" (2013) moves from targeted reference - an inflammatory pre-Revolution pamphlet - to visceral universality. Three layers of beaded curtain - crimson glass strung on threads hanging from the ceiling - flicker between lush trinketry and a vision of bloodshed: a banner proclaiming the peril of life.

"Anonymous" (2013), whose title can bring the hacker activist collective to mind, consists of 16 masks and five red stars, wall-mounted powder-coated aluminum forms, derived from a 1982 leftist pamphlet. But it also sparks thoughts of the turmoil of shifting identity and identification that any radical social change may threaten or demand.